A King's Ransom

Reviews / Votes

[Morande's] life reads like the script of a film, but in this minutely researched and well-written book the author uses his extraordinary life to demonstrate the scope and importance of the world-changing events Morande lived through and chronicled. -- Good Book Guide Morande's career [is] finely illuminated in Simon Burrows's biography -- Colin Jones, New York Review of Books Good review in Standpoint. -- Standpoint [An] excellent resurrection of Morande ... pacily written with a delicious sense of absurdity -- Literary Review Simon Burrows, in the first attempt to reconstruct [Morande's] shadowy life since 1886, pursues him relentlessly through print and archive and the mists of obfuscation that were his natural habitat, and produces a fascinating portrait of a paradoxical man who lived by his poisonous pen. -- Times Literary Supplement ... Burrows' lively, authoritative, and comprehensive narrative will make the compelling story more widely available... In [his] exemplary biography of Morande, libertine morality and political liberalism are situated uncomfortably, but convincingly side by side. -- European History Quarterly, Vol. 41 No. 4 A King's Ransom helps us understand how a corrupt and self-serving individual such as Morande came to be both a valued agent of the French monarchy and a contributor to the development of modern journalism in the years prior to 1789. -- English Historical Review, vol. CXXVI, no 523 A King's Ransom is meticulously researched: the collections of all of the pertinent major and even minor libraries and archives have been examined along with primary and secondary sources. It has been over a century and a quarter since the last biography of Theveneau de Morande was written. After Simon Burrows' definitive work, future scholars will not need another. One final comment about presentation is in order: this book is refreshingly free of typographical errors (I counted only four). At a time when publishers have become more and more dependent on computers and their spelling checkers, it is evident that the editors and the author reviewed the manuscript thoroughly before publication. -- H-France Review Vol. 11 After reading the biography, one could argue that if Morande had not existed, he would
have been a very unlikely creation in fiction, but Simon Burrows has produced a readable
work on him that it is doubtful it will need a new biographical revision for some time
to come. -- Alan Marshall, Bath Spa University * French History, vol 26, no 3 *